Live Distributor Pricing Explained: What Updates, and What Stays Fixed Once You Send a Quote
A client accepts your quote three weeks after you sent it, and the laptop's cost has gone up since. Does the price on the quote move? With Salesbuildr it doesn't. Distributor feeds keep your catalog current for new quotes, and a quote you already sent keeps the cost prices it was built with. Here is how that works, and what to set up so prices stay consistent.
How Often Prices Refresh
Once a distributor is connected, its pricing and availability feed downloads automatically, typically hourly to daily depending on the distributor. Nobody downloads a spreadsheet or imports a file. When a seller adds a laptop to a new quote, they see the current cost and stock from the distributors you connected.
Salesbuildr connects to 50+ distributors, including Pax8, Ingram Micro, TD SYNNEX, Westcoast, Exertis, Dicker Data and Copaco. The number you can connect depends on the plan: up to 6 on Standard, 8 on Advanced and 10 on Premium. The full list is on the distributors page.
What Happens to Quotes You Already Sent
Cost prices are captured when the quote is created, and a sent quote keeps them. A price change in the feed afterwards doesn't touch it. That protects you from a quote changing under the client's nose, and it means your margin on that quote is the margin you saw when you built it.
The flip side is that a quote left open for weeks can drift away from today's cost. Two habits handle that:
- Give every quote an expiry date that fits how volatile its contents are. Hardware-heavy quotes deserve a shorter validity than a services renewal. Salesbuildr sends one expiry reminder per quote.
- When a client comes back after the expiry date, build a fresh version from the catalog instead of reopening the old one.
Stop Quoting Different Prices Every Time
Live cost prices solve half of the consistency problem. The other half is the sell price. Set margin rules in the catalog so the same item gets the same price whoever builds the quote, and use pricing books for clients with agreed prices. A pricing book holds fixed prices per product per client and takes priority over the catalog price.
Credentials: What You Need From Each Distributor
Most distributors ask you to apply for access to their pricing feed. You need those credentials for every distributor you want in Salesbuildr, and we can request them on your behalf as part of onboarding. If they aren't ready by your first onboarding call, carry on with the rest of the setup and add the distributor later. Pax8 connects through OAuth, which may expire after a year; you'll be asked to reconnect, which takes a couple of minutes.
A Supplier That Isn't on the List
New distributor integrations are added based on customer requests, so tell us which supplier you need. For short-lived prices that never come through a feed, such as special bids, deal registration or renewal price files, Premium includes price file imports: load a CSV or Excel file, or paste rows, into the catalog, onto an open quote, or both.
Your Own Stock
If you keep stock, quote from it before you buy more. With Autotask, Salesbuildr reads stock from your Autotask inventory locations, so a seller can see what is already on your shelf next to what the distributors have.
After the Client Accepts
When the client accepts, the quote moves into your PSA with the prices it was sold at, so the team that places the order works from the same numbers. See Delivery for the steps after acceptance, and the Pax8 integration for cloud subscriptions.